Effective grants

Granting success: Lessons from funders and charities

Padraic Brick, Angela Kail, Justine Jarvinen & Tim Fiennes

January 2009, 48 pages

Through experience—both successes and failures—established funders learn lessons about the best ways to structure grants. From these lessons, they are able to adapt and improve the way they give. But for funders new to giving, there is little guidance or research available on how to design the most effective grants.

Granting success provides guidance on how to structure grants so that they have the most impact. It looks in particular at how to make decisions about the size and length of grants, restrictions on grants, and non-grant financing. In each case, it explores best practice and the impact of funding decisions on charities, drawing on our interviews with 17 grant-makers, relevant literature from the UK and US and NPC’s own experiences. It also examines practical barriers to giving the most effective grants and looks at how, in some cases, these can be overcome.

If you are interested in discussing the findings, please contact Lucy de Las Casas.
 

Read about foundations changing their ways and the importance of unrestricted funding on NPC's blog.